Another cog in the culture industry

January 29, 2016

Senator Elizabeth Warren on Rigged Justice

Senator Elizabeth Warren just released a report (PDF, 1.2 MB) that discusses twenty civil and criminal cases from 2015 in which, according to the executive summary, "the federal government failed to require meaningful accountability from either large corporations or their executives involved in wrongdoing."

If that little snippet isn't enough for you, then here's an eye-opening paragraph:

Under the current approach to enforcement, corporate criminals routinely escape meaningful prosecution for their misconduct. This is so despite the fact that the law is unambiguous: if a corporation has violated the law, individuals within the corporation must also have violated the law. If the corporation is subject to charges of wrongdoing, so are those in the corporation who planned, authorized or took the actions. But even in cases of flagrant corporate law breaking, federal law enforcement agencies – and particularly the Department of Justice (DOJ) – rarely seek prosecution of individuals. In fact, federal agencies rarely pursue convictions of either large corporations or their executives in a court of law. Instead, they agree to criminal and civil settlements with corporations that rarely require any admission of wrongdoing and they let the executives go free without any individual accountability.

Just more evidence for the proposition that we are currently living in a plutocracy.

While you're pondering all of this, take a look at Senator Warren's op-ed in The New York Times.